Summer is a good time for gamers, thanks to Steam’s annual summer sale. Here’s our tips for how to make the best of the sale.

Even though the summer months don’t offer a lot of gaming releases, they do offer one big sale, held annually in the Steam store. It’s time again for the Steam summer sale, and that means savings for you, even though you’ll probably end up spending more than you should anyway. The sale lasts from July 11 to July 22 and includes daily deals, bundles, and sometimes discounts of up to 75-90%, even on popular games. There’s a method to how to make the best of these deals, and we’ll do our best to help your wallet out.

First and foremost, fill up your wishlist on Steam. When your game goes on sale, you’ll get an email alert about it. That way, you won’t miss out if a special discount suddenly pops up. There are four main types of discounts you can expect during the sale; A general discounts running between 25-75% will be placed on all games released more than 6 months ago. Daily deals, and the shorter flash deals will run out quickly, but offer 50-75% discounts that are generally steeper than the store-wide discounts. Finally, community deals will place three games on sale as voted on by the Steam community.

Ksurl over at GameFAQs created this handy, helpful flowchart to help you navigate the sale.

So how do you make best use of the discounts? One good tip is to avoid the general discount until the end of the sale. That discount will persist until the sale finishes, which means it won’t hurt to wait. If you’re lucky, the game get a daily deal or flash deal, saving you a few extra bucks somewhere down the line. Also, if your game is in a daily or flash deal, and you happen to miss it, don’t worry: The last day of the sale will be an encore sale, where all the daily and flash deals come back and let you pick up what you missed. The one exception to all this waiting is the bundle deal. Game bundles from developers like Square Enix or THQ will rarely be discounted further than they already are, and that’s because they are always at a ridiculously good price.